Another ‘sports’ section post that has a little to do with sports.
National assembly of Serbia recently decided that they don’t want to hold sessions if the national TV doesn’t broadcast their work live. Yesterday they were supposed to disscuss the signing of the Kyoto protocol, after Croatia, Bosnia and Montenegro signed it a bit earlier this year, leaving us as the last European country not to do so (if you don’t count superpowers like San Marino and Vatican city, that is).
Now that ain’t so bad, because, frankly, in comparison to some countries who refused to sign it, we are practicaly insignificant polluters. But – there is always the question of principle to do the right thing, right.
Alas, it just so happened that a basketball tournament was in session at the same time, so the national television RTS decided that the ball players are far more interesting than watching some guys quarell about life, politics and everything in between. So they cancelled the Assembly game and ran the B-ball game instead.
Cancelation of live broadcast left the members of radical party – SRS, and former Milosevic party – SPS, depressed and angry so they left the building in protest, thus stopping all parliament work and blocking the signing of the Kyoto protocol.
This left me with some interesting conclusions which can be, but aren’t necessarily so, true.
*A game of basketball can be bad for your health some times. *National assembly is very much alike some blogging community – if there don’t have an audience, they stop working. *Serbia has managed to keep some common features with the US and Australia (even though they don’t have any basketball games blocking the Kyoto at their countries).
Update: luckily, the Assembly managed to finish the session yesterday so the Kyoto protocol will be signed after all.
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Well Viktor this is in line with what some members of parliament freely admit – that they use parliament to ‘attract’ voters. Of course the kind of voters that are ‘attracted’ by parliament – thats may make one wonder. Upon occasion I find myself utterly revolted by their behaviour.
Case in point, recently the parliamentary speaker Dulic drew up (or at least put on the agenda) a much needed bill on the new rule book in parliament. This is supposed to help speed debate and hasten implementation of laws etc and also meant to influence the reduction of name-calling from the despatch box by imposing stricter measures. Most people I believe agree that these measures are necessary.
However, after having watched the first session of parliament since they lengthy break for holidays, it became clear that parliamentarians are not interested. One by one they lined up to attack Dulic (for doing this, for not doing that, for not giving them adequate time to bore us to tears etc) of course one would expect this from SRS but you had Batic in there too savaging Dulic along with a couple of DSS MP’s etc. I was disgusted. Even something one might think was non party political in Serbia is treated as a party political issue. The real issue for these MP’s is that Dulic is from DS and therefore, along party lines, they felt they should attack him.
I couldnt care less if Dulic was in SPS and came up with this bill I would support it. And of course, as in the school playground whenone is having an altercation and a crowd is watching, you are more concerned about what the crowd are thinking than the reality of your dispute with your opponent. Pathetic.
Conclusion – perhaps it would be best to take parliament off our television sets, or (my moderate mind-set kicking in) reduce coverage to only the most important debates.
Wow .. in the US, of course, we have three 24-hour cable networks [http://www.c-span.org] dedicated to covering the Senate and House of Representatives. They’re widely considered to be the most boring thing on television, and hardcore political junkies aside, absolutely nobody watches them.
Problem with Serbia is that we have too many hardcore political junkies. Infact, I’m beggining to think that one of our brands is ‘a political junkie’.
Daniel that is the solution that Tijanic, chief of RTS, is proposing. Thinking about more deeply I conclude that Tijanic deliberately short staffed his TV crew knowing it could cause a real fuss.
His aim(s) are twofold but esstentially the same, either the government pays more money to RTS for coverage or a special parliament channel is created – thus costs are cut for RTS.